Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Michael Penney -
Number of replies: 10

Some of our students are learning disabled, and they are supposed to get time and a half on any timed test.

So were looking for a way to give certain students in a quiz a different time limit from others. It probably needs to be check boxes or some similar format, groups wouldn't work for confidentiality reasons.

Our present plan is to make two duplicate quizzes with different timelimits and use grade exceptions to manage who gets points for which quiz.

Has anyone come up with a hack that allows multiple time limits? If not this is a pretty common issue in the US, so I think we'll need to come up with something.

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Helen Foster -
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Hi Michael,

It's pretty common in the UK too so it would be great if you could develop something.
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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by frank weissman -

In the Netherlands it is common as well. So we came up with some workarounds.

1: No timelimit on the quiz. So the attendend(?), teacher has to keep up the time. The student has to prove he/she has extra time offered.

2: use the activity lock in combination with a  choice. If the answer in the choice is yes... unlock the normal quiz. If the answer is no..... you unlock the copy quiz with a different time limit. ( this has effect on your statistics, but because it is a special group, you will be able to account for your action.

3: Because the time limit is a part of the quiz. You need to hack the code. An idea might be to add a field to the registration. This field tells you if there is a handicap or not. With the data in the field you have to change the quiz.php ( a lot of work)......

You will find the same problem in TOIA (english assessments) and Questionmark perception... Almost always you have to create a workaround.

Frank

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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Michael Penney -

Hi Frank, yes it is a tough one. We've decided to go with two quizzes, each with a different password and password.

We'll put them both in a category and use 'Drop the X lowest' to drop the extra quiz from counting in the grades.

Teachers still need to check that students don't share passwords and sneak into the wrong quiz, but this is the easiest way I can think of now.

Our other LMS, Blackboard, the time limits are 'soft', the BB quiz engine tells the student they are out of time, but doesn't kick them out of the quiz. The instructor then has to go in and check the quiz for over time attempts and decide what penalty to give.

I think the Moodle system with 2 quiz, password, and drop lowest score is easier. But the best system would be to have an alternative time limit for a particular set of students in the same quiz.

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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Robert Dickey -

I've run in to a similar yet different problem.  Most of our students take their tests from home, we have diverse types of systems on various platforms, and we get regular problems of individual machines doing odd things such as clocks not starting, then racing to timeout (java-enabled machines of course, else the timed quizzes won't open).

The "soft" time limits of Blackboard as described by Michael Penney (overtime warning to students, does't kick them out of the quiz, OT notice to teacher) would be an ideal solution, particularly if moodle allowed for soft or hard time limit selection as each quiz is designed.

Separate but related,

Within moodle I can't overwrite the "0" scores, and have to either take the test while logged in as student to manufacture a score (pretty crazy, eh, but works if only one or two) or tinker with the uploaded dataset, and I have a hard time getting server permissions (case by case, believe it or not).  So one more toy would be to allow instructor a "revise score" function somewhere, ideally to look at all scores for each quiz (or activity, for that matter), perhaps in the report page.

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In reply to Robert Dickey

Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Michael Penney -
Hi Robert, using Gradebookplus, you can change a quiz grade in the gradebook. I think we'll try and get the soft time limits idea working this summer, if time and funding allows...
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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Joseph Rézeau -
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>(java-enabled machines of course)

I expect you mean javascript-enabled machines thoughtful

Joseph

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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Robert Dickey -
I expect you are correct... when you have Sun Java on the machine (or something similar), that would be different than when you have java-enabled browsers...  most of my students have downloaded java to play various computer-games or whatever...  But yeah, seem's right that javascript-enabled would better serve the purpose of that message.  thanks.  Rob
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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Anthony Borrow -
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I ran into this issue last semester. I would suggest spending the time to work on the hack. I do not think it should be that difficult. I would create a field in the mdl_user table called ExtendedTime. Then when the quiz module goes to get the length of the quiz do a quick check to the user table and and if USER->ExtendedTime=True then the length of time for the quiz is multiplied by a factor (1.5 for us but I think this should be a variable). The question I have is where to best store the length of the extended time factor. Should it be one value for all courses, should it be a course variable??? My initial response would be to make it one factor for all courses. I would be happy to do some work on this but would need a more experienced programmer to check the code. Peace - Anthony.
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Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Michael Penney -
Trouble with a global setting is that students need to tell their instructors they need more time (currently), so just giving all learning disabled students a multiplier for all timed quizzes probably won't work (unless we could get some sort of global policy on this).

So it would have to be a per-quiz setting, to choose students who get extra time. Or select 'soft' time limits on the quiz.
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Quiz accessibility: different time limits for different students

by Ger Tielemans -

If Moodle - in the future - can communicate with the student administration of the school and that administration will store user specific data for access (http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/index.html ?) it can be automated.

Combine this with a check of the performance of the line the user is using for his connection and...

Until this moment a checkmark for 508 students with a standard extra time would help..

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